.htaccess for subfolder of AngularJS app with HTML5 mode

Question

Overview :

I have an AngularJS application that uses $locationProvider.html5Mode(true) and it is served from an Apache server. Until now I used the source code to be accessed from the others and I just needed a redirect to index.html for the angularJS's HTML5 mode. So I had this for the .htaccess file for my /app folder.

.htaccess :

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

    RewriteEngine on

    # Don't rewrite files or directories
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f [OR]
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d
    RewriteRule ^ - [L]

    # Rewrite everything else to index.html to allow html5 state links
    RewriteRule ^ index.html [L]

</IfModule>

Modifications :

I then added Grunt for minifying the whole solution that is generated in the /dist folder of the app(so now the minified solution is found at /app/dist). I would now like to route the whole traffic of my app to the minified version, without making the users change the link. So, in practice I would like to redirect every call from /app to /app/dist.

Directory Structure now :

app
    dist
        minified versions(css,html,js)

I tried using some conditions from here in /app's .htaccess and moved the other .htaccess file in /app/dist, but with no success. I don't even know if the two can be combined in this way. I know I can use the dist folder as /app instead, but I wouldn't really want this, as /app is a repo and it is way easier to keep it updated. So how can I manage to achieve this with redirecting?

Also, as a second thing, is it possible to put a flag somehow so I let alpha users use the normal (not-minified) version for better debugging?

Update:

I added a sample project for this here. I just kept the initial .htaccess files that i showed above and you can check that both versions(/test and /test/dist) work as stated above. Also, it probably has some unused code and dependencies, but I just cut the other parts from my project(don't judge :D).

For this I used the initial configuration with AngularJS 1.4.8 that could generate some errors like the one stated here and here. Feel free to update the AngularJS version to 1.5.8(the last stable release of Angular 1), but take in consideration the comments on Cosmin Ababei's post as well. Also, the project uses npm for installing grunt(and other extensions for grunt), bower for angular and some other basic components and grunt for building the minified version(actually, it's just concatenating resources in same files for now). If you need to change the dependencies, please don't forget to run bower install. If you want to regenerate the dist folder, don't forget to run npm install and grunt build.

Answer 1

I'll assume that inside the /dist directory you have index.html with the updated URLs which point to the minified resources and the correct <base> tag. Note that the <base> tag must point to the /dist folder - just append /dist to the value you're using for the uncompressed index.html and you'd be fine.

With those things in order, here's the updated .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On

# Don't rewrite files
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteRule ^ - [L]

# If the ALPHA_USER cookie is set, serve the uncompressed files
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} ALPHA_USER [NC]
RewriteRule ^ index.html [L]

# Rewrite everything
RewriteRule ^ dist/index.html [L]

You'll notice two things:

• I've removed RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -d as most likely you don't need to serve whole directories

• I've added the ALPHA_USER cookie which would redirect the users to the uncompressed files. This cookie can have any value you desire.